Inclusion and Exclusion in Our Daily Lives PART V: FAMILY & HISTORY PART VI: PARENTING
The first three
poems in
the section Family & History deal with exclusion at
the most intimate level. The young girl in Antoinette Brim's poem waits
with
resolute patience for a father who never comes. Alexandrina Sergio
explores
what it means to have the joy in your own daughter's existence tramped
by the
prejudice of others - and about what it mans to meet others,
unexpectedly but
frequently, who, like her, have their feet firmly set in a larger world
that
can rejoice openly in sexual difference. Marion Cohen writes of the ache
of
exclusion in marriage. The poems of Andrei Guruianu and Jodi Hottel
introduce
the powerful role of historical events in our understanding of our
parents and
aunts and uncles, an introduction to the dynamics of exclusion and
inclusion on
ever larger stages. The feeling of being moved and defined by forces
beyond our
understanding is present here, as it was in the first section on
childhood, but
also includes an adult sense of the need to bear witness, a stance that
Carol
DeCanio carries through in her poem, "After".
The final section,
Parenting, focuses
on the powerful responses parents have to exclusion that
threatens to disrupt their ability to parent, as in Katrin Talbot's
poem,
"The Drs. So & So and the Fine Art of Exclusion," or that
threatens their unusual child's ability to live a life of social
inclusion. Donald
Vogel muses on the traits he shares with his autistic son and on how he
needs,
as a parent, to move beyond identification to a steady gaze that can
accept
both his son and himself. McCabe Coolidge's memoir about his
developmentally
disabled daughter invite us, again, to think about what relationships
really
matter and what constitutes a richly connected life.
